Constructing Business Queries

The Datafiniti API lets you build out a wide variety of search queries so you can get the exact data you want.

Querying a Single Field

The simplest query you can do is querying a single field. Here's an example:

{
	"query": "city:Austin"
}

This tells the API to search the business database for any business that has the value Austin in its city field.

You can do similar queries on any of the fields in the business schema. Here's an example that queries the name field:

{
	"query": "name:mechanic"
}

Querying Multiple Fields

You can run more complicated queries by combining fields with various boolean operators (e.g., AND OR). For example:

{
	"query": "categories:hotels AND city:Austin"
}

This returns any businesses that are categorized as hotels and are in the city of Austin.

You can use the OR operator to run broader queries. For example:

{
	"query": "categories:hotels OR categories:restaurants"
}

That's not all though. We can group fields and operators with parentheses to do some really fancy stuff:

{
	"query": "(categories:hotels OR categories:restaurants) AND city:Austin"
}

Querying Multiple Values

If you want to query multiple values within the same field, there is a simple way to do this. For example:

{
	"query": "categories:(hotels OR restaurants OR bars)"
}

This returns any businesses matching any of the above categories. This is much simpler than:

{
	"query": "categories:hotels OR categories:restaurants OR categories:bars"
}

Wildcards

You can use * to query a field for any value, like this:

{
	"query": "phones:*"
}

This will return any businesses that have an associated phone number. This is helpful if we want to make sure any businesses we get back are guaranteed to have certain fields filed out.

Wildcards can do more though. You can also append * to the value we're searching on to broaden its potential matches. For example:

{
	"query": "categories:invest*"
}

This will return businesses with any of the following in their categories field: invest, investor, investment, investing, and so on.

Querying Sub-fields

Several fields in our schema have sub-fields. For example, reviews has sub-fields like date, rating, and others. Everything you can do to query fields, you can also do to query sub-fields. For example:

{
	"query": "reviews.rating:3"
}

will return all businesses that have a review with a 3-star rating.

It's important to note here that querying on sub-fields will not only return sub-objects that match your query. The entire field will be returned.

For instance, if a business look likes this:

{
  "name": "example business",
  "reviews": [
    {
      "rating": 3
    },
    {
      "rating": 4
    }
  ]
}

{
  "name": "example business",
  "reviews": [
    {
      "rating": 3
    },
    {
      "rating": 4
    }
  ]
}

then you'll see both rating values in your data, even if you do "query": "reviews.rating:3".

Compound Queries on Sub-fields

Along with querying individual sub-fields, you can also query for sub-objects that have multiple fields that meet specific requirements. For example, you can find all businesses where at least one reviewer was from Austin and gave the business a five star rating.

{
   "query":"{ reviews.rating:5 AND reviews.userProvince:Austin }",
    "num_records":10
}

The key thing to note for these queries is that any sub-field requirements that you want to match within a single sub-object must be contained within curly brackets ""

Range Queries

Any fields that are dates, integers, or doubles will let you search them based on a range.

{
	"query": "dateAdded:[2017-01-01 TO 2017-02-01]"
}

will return all businesses that have been added to the database between Jan 1, 2017 and Feb 2, 2017.

You can do unbounded range queries as well, like:

{
	"query": "dateAdded:[2017-01-01 TO *]"
}

This will return all businesses have been added since Jan 1, 2017 until the current date.

You can also use comparison operators like >, >=, <=, and <. These are helpful when you want to search for products that are cheaper or more expensive than certain limits. E.g.:

{
	"query": "reviews.rating:>3"
}

returns all businesses that have reviews greater than 3.

Excluding Values

For some searches, you'll want to exclude certain values from returning. For example, let's say you wanted to find all restaurants, except for fast food locations. You would use the - operator to negate fast food values:

{
	"query": "categories:restaurants AND -categories"fast food""
}

Geo Queries

You can also use the API to do queries based around latitude and longitude values. For example, if you would like to find all businesses within 10 miles of a specific point in Austin, Texas you could use the following query.

{
    "query":"geoLocation:[-97.7430600,30.2671500,10,mi]"
}

The format for the parameter values is: [ Longitude, Latitude, Distance, Distance Unit ]

You can also use the following units for measuring distance:

m - meters
mi - miles
ft - feet
in - yards
mm - millimeters
km - kilometers
NM - nautical miles
cm - centimeters

Count Feature

As an alternative or used for testing purposes you can set your num_records to 0 in your business search query. This is will only return the num_found of the query and will cost 0 credits to search.

{
  "query": "country:US",
  "num_records":0
}

Paging Over Results

As an alternative to running a download, you can also use the API to page through the data. This approach allows you to consume one chunk at a time.

POST https://api.datafiniti.co/v4/products/paginate?page=1&limit=50
{
  "query": "keys:*"
}

The pagination endpoint uses the following parameters:

• page - You specify which chunk of data you would like to access. You can iterate the page to work your way through all of the results. You cannot paginate further than the 10,000th record.
• limit - This specifies the number of results you want returned within the page. The maximum number of results that can be returned per page is 1,000.

Regex Queries

You can filter any field with a regular expression by wrapping the pattern in forward slashes (/.../). This lets you match values by shape rather than by exact string. For example, to match any postal code beginning with 921 followed by two more digits:

{
	"query": "postalCode:/921[0-9]{2}/"
}

Character classes — [0-9]

A character class matches any single character from a set. Use [0-9] for a digit, and {n} to repeat it. For example, all four-digit SIC codes:

{
	"query": "sic:/[0-9]{4}/"
}

Wildcards — .*

. matches any single character and * repeats the preceding token zero or more times, so .* matches any run of characters. For example, any business name that contains Seafood:

{
	"query": "name:/.*Seafood.*/"
}

Alternation — |

The pipe (|) matches any one of several alternatives. For example, either of two provinces:

{
	"query": "province:/CA|NV/"
}

Combining with other operators

Regex patterns work alongside boolean operators and other fields just like any other query:

{
	"query": "name:/.*Seafood.*/ AND province:/CA|NV/ AND numEmployeesMin:<10"
}